August 5th 2011 NASA's Juno spacecraft blasted off on a 5-year voyage to a freakish world: planet Jupiter.
Jupiter has a long list of oddities. For one thing, it's enormous,
containing 70% of our solar system's planetary material, yet it is not
like the rocky world beneath our feet. Jupiter is so gassy, it seems
more like a star. Jupiter’s atmosphere brews hurricanes twice as wide as
Earth itself, monsters that generate 400 mph winds and lightning 100
times brighter than terrestrial bolts. The giant planet also emits a
brand of radiation lethal to unprotected humans.
Jupiter's strangest feature, however, may be a 25,000 mile deep
soup of exotic fluid sloshing around its interior. It's called liquid
metallic hydrogen.
"Here on Earth, hydrogen is a colorless, transparent gas," says
Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton. "But in the core of Jupiter,
hydrogen transforms into something bizarre."

This cut-away illustrates a hypothesized model of the interior of Jupiter

Jupiter is 90% hydrogen, with 10% helium and a
sprinkle of all the other elements. In the gas giant’s outer layers,
hydrogen is a gas just like on Earth. As you go deeper, intense
atmospheric pressure gradually turns the gas into a dense fluid.
Eventually the pressure becomes so great that it squeezes the electrons
out of the hydrogen atoms and the fluid starts to conduct like a metal.
What’s this fluid like?
"Liquid metallic hydrogen has low viscosity, like water, and it's a
good electrical and thermal conductor," says Caltech's David Stevenson,
an expert in planet formation, evolution, and structure. "Like a
mirror, it reflects light, so if you were immersed in it [here's hoping
you never are], you wouldn't be able to see anything."

Jupiter's hydrogen sea

Here on Earth, liquid metallic hydrogen has been made in shock
wave experiments, but since it doesn't stay in that form it has only
been made in tiny quantities for very short periods of time. If
researchers are right, Jupiter's core may be filled with oceans of the
stuff.
There's so much LMH inside Jupiter that it transforms the planet
into an enormous generator. "A deep layer of liquid metallic hydrogen
and Jupiter's rapid rotation (about 10 hours) create a magnetic field
450 million miles long -- the biggest entity in the solar system," says
Bolton. Jupiter's magnetosphere can produce up to 10 million amps of
electric current, with auroras that light up Jupiter’s poles more
brightly than any other planet.
Although scientists are fairly sure that liquid metallic hydrogen
exists inside Jupiter, they don't know exactly how the big planet's
interior is structured. For instance, where does the hydrogen turn into a
conductor? Does Jupiter have a core of heavy elements inside? Juno's mission is to answer those key questions. "By mapping Jupiter's magnetic field, gravity field, and
atmospheric composition, Juno will tell us a great deal about the
make-up of Jupiter's interior."
It's important to understand this behemoth because it wielded a
lot of influence in the solar system's formation. After the sun took
shape out of the solar nebula, Jupiter formed from the majority of
leftover material. The state and composition of the material remaining
just after the sun formed are preserved in Jupiter.
"It holds the heirloom recipe that made our solar system's first planets," says Bolton. "And we want it."
With last Friday's launch, "Jupiter becomes our lab, Juno our
instrument, to unlock the secrets of gas giants," he says. And what Juno
discovers could be very freakish, indeed.Credit: NASA

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

There's an urban legend about a woman killed by a shaft of frozen
urine fallen from a plane's leaking toilet. Then there's the one about
pennies dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, passing
through pedestrians' skulls like bullets. Then there's the one about
telephone pole-sized tungsten rods dropping from an orbital weapons
platform at 36,000 feet per second to impact the earth below with the
force of a meteor strike.

Guess which one you won't find on Snopes under "stupid bullshit?"
Yes, enormous Swords of Damocles hanging in space are one more reason
to lie awake at night, thinking about how much safer we feel thanks to
science.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

A neutron star is about 20 km in diameter and has the
mass of about 1.4
times that of our Sun.

One teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons (or more)

Some neutron stars have jets of materials streaming out of them at
nearly the speed of light. As these beams pan past Earth, they flash
like the bulb of a lighthouse. This pulsing appearance led them to be called pulsars.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Large flares are often associated with huge ejections of mass from the
Sun, although the association is not clear. These coronal mass ejections
(CMEs) are balloon-shaped bursts of solar wind
rising above the solar corona, expanding as they climb. Solar plasma is
heated to tens of millions of degrees, and electrons, protons, and
heavy nuclei are accelerated to near the speed of light. The
super-heated electrons from CMEs move along the magnetic field lines
faster than the solar wind can flow.

CMEs are not small either...

Rearrangement of the magnetic
field, and solar flares may result in the formation of a shock that
accelerates particles ahead of the CME loop. Each CME releases up to
100 billion kg (220 billion lb) of this material, and the speed of the
ejection can reach 1000 km/second (2 million mph) in some flares. Solar
flares and CMEs are currently the biggest "explosions" in our solar
system, roughly approaching the power in one billion hydrogen atomic bombs.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

For scary speculation about
the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of
cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group
of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued
earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms. Entitled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,”
it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of
energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming
high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and
short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United
States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the
panel, and “full recovery could take four to 10 years.” That would, of
course, be just a fraction of global damages.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

*From the MarsOne websiteThe environment of Mars contains dust that is much finer than that found on Earth. While the exact effects of this fine dust on technical hardware and equipment are not fully known, it is not impossible to engineer equipment to survive it. The NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity were designed to operate for a minimum of 90 days, but have exceeded their target lifespans substantially. Spirit lasted about 1900 days. Opportunity is still driving around and investigating Mars since January 2004.

It is unknown how the fine Mars dust might affect humans, should they be exposed to it. However, the astronauts will only go outside in their fully-enclosed Mars suits, and inside the habitat, the air will be filtered to remove the dust.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Balloons provide a unique vantage point for scientific observation.
Balloons can fly one hundred times closer to the surface of Mars than
orbiters and can travel a thousand times further than rovers in a
comparable period, thus providing views of much broader areas of the
surface.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The air on Mars would kill a human quickly. The atmosphere is less
than 1% of Earth’s, so it would be hard to breath. What you would have
available to your lungs would be undesirable to say the least. The air
on Mars consists of 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and the
remainder is trace amounts of oxygen, water vapor, and other gases.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Work on solar flares could prove important for future missions to
Mars that might eventually be part of a plan outlined by President Bush
in 2004. On Earth, solar flares have been known to damage or skew
results from satellites such as those making up the Global Positioning
System (GPS).
"If humans go to Mars and have a similar positioning system there,
knowing about ionosphere effects will be important," Withers said.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Mars has a thin atmosphere — too thin to easily support life as we know
it. The extremely thin air on Mars can also become very dusty. Giant
dust storms can blanket the entire planet and last for months.

What is Mars' atmosphere made of?

The atmosphere of Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth's, and it
is 95 percent carbon dioxide. Here's a breakdown of its composition:

Sunday, May 3, 2015

1. It's the longest system of canyons in the Solar System, at over 4000
km long. If you were to drive a car at 100 km/h (60 miles per hour), it
would take you over 40 hours to drive the length of Valles Marineris. It
would be like driving from Madrid to Moscow.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Getting to Mars
With current rocket technology, it takes
between seven and nine months to reach Mars. That’s a long time to be
cooped up inside a tiny spacecraft with, presumably, a small number of
crewmates.
The potential psychological effects of such isolation
are not fully known, although there are parallels here on Earth with
long-duration submarine deployments and wintering expeditions in
Antarctica.

NASA announces world's biggest-ever rocket to take man to Mars and beyond

Then there are the physical health issues — in
weightlessness, your bones and muscles begin to deteriorate. Astronauts
aboard the International Space Station take regular exercise, but even
that does not fully stop the decline.
And then there’s food. Who wants to spend seven months eating
instant meals? Growing some edible plants during the journey sounds like
a good idea, but it’s a bit of a risky proposition — what happens if
your crops fail?

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

If we really wish to fathom the mysteries of antimatter, we must first
get to grips with the stuff itself. Easier said than done. How on earth
do you pin down a substance that vanishes the moment it touches
anything?Although it sounds exotic, antimatter would look no different to
matter if you came across a lump of it. Even individual atoms of matter
and antimatter would be indistinguishable. It’s only inside the atoms
that their true nature is evident.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

The Alcubierre drive or Alcubierre metric is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (i.e. negative mass) could be created. Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame,
a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of
it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective
faster-than-light travel.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Nuclear fusion reactions sparked by beams of antimatter could be
propelling ultra-fast spaceships on long journeys before the end of the
century, researchers say.

A fusion-powered spacecraft could reach Jupiter within four months, potentially opening up parts of the outer solar system to manned exploration, according to a 2010 NASA report.

A number of hurdles would have to be overcome ― particularly in the
production and storage of antimatter ― to make the technology feasible,
but some experts imagine it could be ready to go in a half-century or
so.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Rockets that harness the power of nuclear fusion may provide the next
big leap in humanity's quest to explore the final frontier, NASA's
science chief says.

Lockheed's Skunk works facility has made many breakthroughs of late

Nuclear fusion rockets could
slash travel times through deep space dramatically, potentially opening
up vast swathes of the solar system to human exploration, said John
Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate.

"It's transformative," Grunsfeld said last month after his presentation
at Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo, Calif., a two-day celebration of
DIY science, technology and engineering. "You could get to Saturn in a
couple of months. How fantastic would that be?"

For a little perspective: NASA's robotic Cassini spacecraft blasted off in October 1997 and didn't enter Saturn orbit until July 2004.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to take off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

While rocket fuel has provided the energy for most space travel so
far, solar energy may provide the boost for spaceships in the future.
Just like cloth sails harness the wind, giant reflective sheets called
solar sails can harness the sun's energy . These sheets could save fuel and provide maneuverability, but cannot function deep in space.

Artist concept of a solar sail in space

Solar sails work by capturing the energy from light particles
as they bounce off a reflective surface, according to the Department of
Energy. Each light particle has momentum, and when it strikes a
reflective surface, it imparts that momentum to the reflective sheet,
just like a collision of two billiard balls.

As billions of light particles hit the sheet, they push the sail
strongly enough to move a spacecraft. Over time, the solar particles
could keep pushing a spaceship faster and faster, allowing it to attain
very high speeds, according to scientists at Argonne National
Laboratory.

Scientists
at the University of Rochester have discovered a way to hide large
objects from sight using inexpensive and readily available lenses, a
technology that seems to have sprung from the pages of J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter fantasy series.

Cloaking is the process by which an
object becomes hidden from view, while everything else around the
cloaked object appears undisturbed.

"A lot of people have worked on a lot of different aspects of optical
cloaking for years," John Howell, a professor of physics at the upstate
New York school, said on Friday.

A laser shows the paths that light rays travel through the system, showing regions that can be used for cloaking an object. Photo: University of Rochester

Monday, March 9, 2015

A mother ship resembling a giant football, a
whirling coin-shaped disk that flashes across the sky, a diamond-shaped
craft with a brilliant, mirror-like surface…

These are among the most common UFO shapes, according to veteran UFO researcher Brad Steiger, author of Mysteries of Time and Space.

Here are detailed descriptions based on Steiger’s analysis of several thousand sightings over the past 40 years:

8. BLINDING LIGHT. Typically spotted at night, this UFO
doesn’t have a definite shape – it’s simply a dazzling orange light.
“But it moves methodically, as if guided by some form of alien
intelligence.”

Thursday, March 5, 2015

You have only to read or hear a few flying saucer reports to realize
that aerodynamically something very interesting is involved. In both
speed and maneuverability the UFO is remarkable. If it is a machine -
and I think it is - it is surely a terrific one. It represents a level
of scientific development far beyond anything dreamed by terrestrial
science.

This can best be demonstrated by quoting a few instances. When, for
example, UFOs first came to public attention in the late 1940s, their
superior performance was immediately apparent. The report of Kenneth
Arnold, the Washington state businessman who saw, if not the first
flying saucer in history, certainly the first one in which the world
took an interest, illustrates the point.

Friday, February 20, 2015

When the sun becomes a red giant, the simple calculation would put
its equator out past Mars. All of the inner planets would be consumed.

However, as the Sun reaches this late stage in its stellar evolution,
it loses a tremendous amount of mass through powerful stellar winds. As
it grows, it loses mass, causing the planets to spiral outwards. So the
question is, will the expanding Sun overtake the planets spiraling
outwards, or will Earth (and maybe even Venus) escape its grasp.

The third largest extinction in Earth's
history, the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction had two peak dying
times separated by hundreds of thousands of years. During the
Ordovician, most life was in the sea, so it was sea creatures such as
trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites that were drastically reduced in
number. In all, some 85% of sea life was wiped out. An ice age has been
blamed for the extinctions - a huge ice sheet in the southern
hemisphere caused climate change and a fall in sea level, and messed
with the chemistry of the oceans.

A diorama portraying the seas of the Ordovician Period (from the Exhibit Museum, University of Michigan)

Monday, February 16, 2015

Galaxies extend as far as we can detect... with no sign of diminishing.There
is no evidence that the universe has an edge. The part of the
universe we can observe from Earth is filled more or less uniformly
with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see
- more than 10 billion light-years, or about 6 billion trillion
miles. We know that the galaxies must extend much further than
we can see, but we do not know whether the universe is infinite
or not. When astronomers sometimes refer (carelessly!) to galaxies "near
the edge of the universe," they are referring
only to the edge of the OBSERVABLE universe - i.e., the part we can see.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

A Seismic Adventure

There's a giant crystal buried deep within the Earth, at the very
center, more than 3,000 miles down. It may sound like the latest fantasy
adventure game or a new Indiana Jones movie, but it happens to be what
scientists discovered in 1995 with a sophisticated computer model of
Earth's inner core. This remarkable finding, which offers plausible
solutions to some perplexing geophysical puzzles, is transforming what
Earth scientists think about the most remote part of our planet.

Friday, February 13, 2015

About 4 to 3.8 billion years ago a period of intense comet and asteroid bombardment is thought to have peppered all the planets including the Earth. Many of the numerous craters found on the Moon and other bodies in the Solar System record this event.
One theory holds that a gravitational surge caused by the orbital interaction of Jupiter and Saturn sent Neptune careening into the ring of comets
in the outer Solar System. The disrupted comets were sent in all
directions and collided with the planets. These water-rich objects may
have provided much of the water in the Earth's oceans.
The record of this event is all but lost on the Earth because our planet's tectonic plate system and active erosion ensure that the surface is constantly renewed.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest planet
in the solar system. Saturn was the Roman name for Cronus, the lord of
the Titans in Greek mythology. Saturn is the root of the English word
"Saturday."

Saturn is the farthest planet from Earth visible to the naked human
eye, but it is through a telescope that the planet's most outstanding
features can be seen: Saturn's rings. Although the other gas giants in
the solar system — Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune — also have rings, those
of Saturn are without a doubt the most extraordinary.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

The smallest of the planets in the Solar System, Mercury is an interesting place. Incredibly dense due to its proportionately large core Mercury is thought to have been once a much larger planet.

Mercury is the smallest planet —
it is only slightly larger than Earth's moon. Since it has no
significant atmosphere to stop impacts, the planet is pockmarked with
craters. About 4 billion years ago, an asteroid roughly 60 miles (100
kilometers) wide struck Mercury with an impact equal to 1 trillion
1-megaton bombs, creating a vast impact crater roughly 960 miles (1,550
km) wide. Known as the Caloris Basin, this crater could hold the entire
state of Texas. Another large impact may have helped create the
planet’s odd spin.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

What if we had no Moon?Or what if the we had a Moon like we do now and it suddenly disappeared?Find out what would happen.

1.) There’d be no such thing as eclipses on Earth.
Without the Sun, Moon and Earth, there would be no eclipses. The Sun
is constantly shining on Earth, casting a shadow for over a million
miles (and over a million kilometers) in its wake. Yet without our Moon —
just a few hundred thousand miles (or kilometers) away — there’d be no
object that would pass through the Earth’s shadow; there’d be no lunar
eclipses.
There’d also be no solar eclipses: no annular, partial, or total eclipses. The Moon’s shadow is almost exactly
equal in length to the Earth-Moon distance; without the Moon, no
shadow, and no disc to block the Sun’s disk. The next largest object
that can pass in between the Earth (after the Moon) is Venus, and while it’s incredibly cool when that happens, that’s the closest we’d get to an eclipse without the Moon.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

90377 Sedna is a large planetoid in the outer reaches of the Solar System that was, as of 2012, about three times as far from the Sun as Neptune. Spectroscopy
has revealed that Sedna's surface composition is similar to that of
some other trans-Neptunian objects, being largely a mixture of water, methane and nitrogen ices with tholins. Its surface is one of the reddest among Solar System objects. It is most likely a dwarf planet.

Astronomer Michael E. Brown, co-discoverer of Sedna and the dwarf planets Eris, Haumea, and Makemake,
believes it to be the most scientifically important trans-Neptunian
object found to date, because understanding its unusual orbit is likely
to yield valuable information about the origin and early evolution of
the Solar System.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

In
1983, a scientist named Richard Muller came up with an interesting
theory to explain the almost regular intervals between mass extinctions
on Earth.

Roughly every 26 million years, the Earth suffers a massive extinction event in which whole species and ecosystems disappear. It's widely believed and accepted by the scientific community that the extinction events are precipitated by the impacts of comets and asteroid impacts, but what Muller devised to explain the almost regular event was rather scandalous - what if the sun had an evil twin brother?

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Of all known stars, the VY Canis Majoris is the largest. This red Hypergiant star, found in the constellation Canis Major,
is estimated to have a radius at least 1,800 that of the Sun’s. In
astronomy-speak we use the term 1,800 solar radii to refer to this
particular size. Although not the most luminous among all known stars,
it still ranks among the top 50.

Hypergiants are the most massive and luminous of stars. As such, they
emit energy at a very fast rate. Thus, hypergiants only last for a few
million years. Compare that to the Sun and similar stars that can keep
on burning up to 10 billion years. VY Canis Majoris a.k.a. VY CMa is about 4,900 light years from the Earth.

The radius has been estimated to come in at about 8.2AU (possibly even
up to 10.2AU!), but the term, ‘surface,’ has no real definition here.
You see, in the outer layers of the star, its density is so low, that it
may be more comparable to a vacuum than a star. Its gargantuan size and
properties have even sparked debate as to whether or not we can
consider it a definite star, or if its more akin to a spherical nebula
burning at 3000k! It is generally agreed that it is a star – and it
isn’t alone. VY CMa belongs to a very exclusive group of stars, dubbed
hypergiants. Hypergiants are so massive that they devour themselves at
exponential rates – in other words, the amount of energy our Sun emits
in year is equal to what a hypergiant would release in just 6 seconds.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

If you were falling toward a black hole, most of the time you would
simply feel weightless. The
gravity of a black hole is just like the gravity of any other large
mass, as long as you don’t get too close.

Suppose you were falling feet first toward a black hole. As you got
closer, your feet would feel a stronger force than your head, for
example. These differences in forces are called tidal forces. Because of
the tidal forces it would feel as if you are being stretched head to
toe, while your sides would feel like they are being pushed inward.
Eventually the tidal forces would become so strong that they would rip
you apart. This effect of tidal stretching is sometimes
referred to as spaghettification.

There are two predominant types of black hole in the universe. The
first are supermassive black holes found churning at the centre of
galaxies. These don’t really pose any threat to us, until our galaxy
collides with another like the Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.

The other type are interstellar black holes, those formed when a
large star goes supernova. These can be just a dozen or so miles across,
with one of the closest to us being Cygnus X-1 about 6,000 light-years
away measuring 44 kilometres (27 miles) in diameter. If a black hole
like Cygnus X-1 were to stray near the Solar System, within a light-year
or so, its gravity would cause chaos. The orbits of the outer planets
and comets would be significantly and possibly disastrously altered, and
this would in turn threaten the orbits of the inner planets and even
the Sun. However, if the black hole passed directly through the Solar
System, then things get immeasurably worse.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

The Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are regions of space. The known
icy worlds and comets in both regions are much smaller than Earth's
moon.

The Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud surround our sun, a star. The Kuiper
Belt is a doughnut-shaped ring, extending just beyond the orbit of
Neptune from about 30 to 55 AU. The Oort Cloud is a spherical shell,
occupying space at a distance between five and 100 thousand AU.

Long-period comets (which take more than 200 years to orbit the sun)
come from the Oort Cloud. Short-period comets (which take less than 200
years to orbit the Sun) originate in the Kuiper Belt.